December 14 2005

A
recent survey provides clear evidence that a large number of organizations
are experiencing disastrous Exchange Server failures. The survey was conducted
by Lucid8, a provider of automated disaster prevention, optimization and
recovery software for Microsoft Exchange Server and was directed at organizations
that rely heavily on e-mail as a driving force in communications. More
than 360 IT managers, messaging and Exchange specialists participated in
the study, providing a highly representative base of respondents.

Seems
like a pretty good sample size and solid methodology...let's take a look
at the results.

- Nearly three quarters of the respondents
had suffered from an Exchange disaster. 70 percent of these firms stated
that their Exchange Server was down for at least eight hours, and 45 percent
said it was down for more than 24 hours per incident.

- Almost half of the respondents stated
the cost of lost opportunity was more than $5,000 per incident, and 23
percent reported that they had experienced permanent data loss from server
disasters.

70% of firms have had at least eight hours
downtime per incident, and almost half have had more than one
day downtime per incident. One quarter have experienced
permanent data loss.

It almost would be too easy to talk
about Domino's multiplatform characteristics, single mailbox per user deployments,
and shared-nothing clustering at this point. The survey results would
be substantially different for IBM Lotus Domino customers. Hmmm...